Bill Chambers once again recently featured at the Tamworth country music festival, where he has a regular daily gig at the Pub, but where he was also able to launch his new album Frozen Ground for the first time. The band are feeling pretty good playing the new songs, Bill’s feeling pretty alright, and things are rolling along nicely.

“I’ve got some guys that I call on,” he says of the pick-up band, “and one of them plays in Kasey’s band, and sometimes if I can’t grab someone I grab someone else – sometimes I grab James Gillard from the Floods to help me out. It’s really good. I just use who I can get, and sometimes if I’m going somewhere I’ll use a different band – like if I’m going to Adelaide I’ll use a different band again.”

Given his nomadic past, it’s no surprise that Bill is a fan of living and loving the spur of the moment, and sometimes magic things happen when you’re not expecting them, like when you don’t know who you’re playing with. It can make for very different performance at each turn he agrees. “You never know what’s going to happen, and sometimes the song doesn’t even feel the same. It makes me smile sometimes, when you think ‘this song sounds totally different to how it did last night’. That doesn’t happen all the time.”

Frozen Ground marks Bill’s second album, and it surprises by featuring a selection of what he dubs ‘angry songs’ – he readily admits that he had a period a bit over a year ago where life got him down, and that’s represented in the songs. “There’s one song called “This Ain’t Your Town” and the hookline is “This ain’t your town/This ain’t your fucking town no more”, but that came out of a conversation,” he explains. “I’m like everybody else: you have your bad days and if you have an argument with someone you go home and write a song about it. I didn’t mention any names, but it lets off a bit of anger and you feel better afterwards. Why not? They’re not all angry songs, and there’s even a couple of nice ones – there’s a couple of love songs and a couple of sad songs, and a nice sad little one about death.”

For, yes, it’s come to the point in time where, as a songwriter, Bill is now questioning his own mortality. The first song’s called “Falling Like the Snow” and there’s another song “Theresa”, both of which are about dying “But that’s life,” he says. “I think I’m aware of that, but you can’t help it.”

He admits that he certainly listened to the last 2 studio albums produced by Bob Dylan that traversed similar ground, but he didn’t particularly try to make his record like a Bob Dylan record. “But his influence will always come out because I love him – I love his songwriting and his singing, and I’ve got a rough old voice so it’s easier for me to sing a Bob Dylan song than an Eagles song, y’know? Much easier, and I reckon much better. I discovered Dylan when I was 13, and our music teacher brought along The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, one of the best albums ever made, and it’s Dylan’s acoustic era. I followed him through every different turn he’s made, and he’s made a few.”

Was that your original inspiration to perform, hearing music like that?

“Absolutely,” Bill confirms. “In the same year I heard the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, so I couldn’t have picked a better time to be 13 years old! I was learning the guitar and all these stuff, and I was listening to a lot of country music like Johnny Cash and Hank Williams – the real stuff – and then I heard the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. I’ve still got my heart in country music, but I like to infuse it with rock elements, and a bit of Dylan and everything else. I like the fact that Dylan writes songs about real things, and there’s certainly an emotional connection.”

Bill only really began his solo career when his daughter Kasey fell pregnant with her son Talon, necessitating the band to take some time off the road, resulting in his first solo record three years ago. “Now the new one’s out, and I’m a grandfather! I’m happy, and I’ve never been more contented in my life – even if I did have an angry period where I wrote angry songs, I’m actually happy.”

Unlike his offspring, Bill admits that he’s a relatively slow writer, spending the three intervening years between solo releases to write all the songs that make up Frozen Ground – they didn’t come in a rush as do Kasey’s releases. “Kasey’s got all the songs for her next album now, and I’m just not that prolific. I’ve got to have a few heartbreaks and ups-and-downs.”

The writing process changed as he went from anger to contentedness, originally penning seven or eight songs that were angry, before about a year ago writing ‘nicer’ songs to balance that, albeit with a dark hue, traversing topics such as death. The trick was to achieve the balance. “I was going to call it Poison Blood for a start, one of the rock songs on the album, but it sounds a little negative,” he says of the album title. “By that time another 6 months went past and I was less angry.”

Bill Chambers’ Frozen Ground is out now.